The Making of the Sympathetic Imagination

Transformations of Sympathy in British Eighteenth-Century Philosophy and Fiction
1. Auflage 2020
ISBN: 978-3-11-062401-4
Verlag: De Gruyter

Buch, Englisch, 210 Seiten, Format (B × H): 170 mm x 240 mm, Gewicht: 515 g

Reihe: ISSN

How is it that we feel with fictional characters and so approve or disapprove of their actions? For many British Enlightenment thinkers writing at a time when sympathy was the pivot of ethics as well as poetics, this question was crucial. Asserting that the notion of the sympathetic imagination prominent in Romantic criticism and poetry originates in Moral Sentimentalism, this study traces the emergence of what became a key concept of intersubjectivity. It shows how, contrary to earlier traditions, Francis Hutcheson and his disciples successively established the imagination rather than reason as the pivotal faculty through which sympathy is rendered morally effective. Writing at the interface of ethics and poetics, Adam Smith, Lord Kames and others explored the sympathetic imagination as a means of both explaining emotional reader response and discovering moral distinctions. As a result, the sentimental novel became the sight of ethical controversy. Arguing against the dominant view of research which claims that the novel of sensibility is mostly uncritically sentimental, the book demonstrates that it is precisely in this genre that the sympathetic imagination is sceptically assessed in terms of its literary and moral potential.

Zielgruppe

All those interested in Eighteenth-Century Studies, British Enlig

Autoren/Hrsg.

Barton, Roman Alexander

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur
• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Geschichte der Westlichen Philosophie Westliche Philosophie: 18. Jahrhundert

Über Autor(innen)

Roman Alexander Barton, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany.